Home, Heart, Health

One in five patients discharged from the hospital will be readmitted within three weeks.

It was this statistic that prompted Jodi Feinberg to put her Penn Nursing education to good use.

Feinberg, a recipient of the 2015 President’s Engagement Prize, is tackling one of nursing’s most timely, and most pressing, challenges: in-home care.

“With the complexity and number of medications patients are required to take upon discharge from the hospital, many patients and their families are overwhelmed and struggle to care for themselves at home and in their communities,” says Feinberg. “My vision is to develop a program that can ensure cardiac patients receive the rehabilitative support they need where they are most comfortable: in their homes and communities.”

For her project, Home, Heart, Health: Engaging the Community in Bridging the Gap, Feinberg is teaming up with the Visiting Nurse Service of New York and New York University Langone Medical Center, both of which serve New York’s five boroughs as well as parts of upstate New York.

The President's Engagement Prize is truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the world.

Jodi Feinberg, 2015 Prize recipient

Working with the organizations, Feinberg’s ultimate goal is to build a bridge between inpatient and outpatient cardiac rehabilitation to ensure optimal patient care.

None of this would be possible, she says, without the President’s Engagement Prize.

“The President’s Engagement Prize is truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the world,” says Feinberg. “With the encouragement of my family and my incredible mentor, Dr. Terri Lipman, I realized that this prize could be the catalyst to my role in bettering the world for mankind.”

President Gutmann with Jodi Feinberg and Terri Lipman.

The project is ambitious, but those close to Feinberg say that her spirit of engagement and commitment to helping others is nothing new.

As an undergraduate at Penn, Feinberg founded The Community Champions Program, a collaboration of sustainable community-based initiatives to promote health and wellness in University-assisted schools, clinics, and senior centers. She was also project coordinator of Dance for Health, an intergenerational program developed to increase activity and combat obesity in West Philadelphia. As part of the Penn Medicine CPR Anytime research team, Feinberg also empowered more than 100 family members of cardiac patients with the skills they might need to save lives in the event of an emergency.

“Jodi is thoroughly dedicated to community engagement,” says Lipman, a professor of nursing and interim assistant dean for community engagement in Penn Nursing. “She has a passion for research and has more motivation and is more committed to bringing initiatives to fruition than any undergraduate or graduate student I have encountered in 25 years of teaching.”

At a Glance

Student

Jodi Feinberg

Project

Home, Heart, Health: Engaging the Community in Bridging the Gap

Summary

Feinberg is designing, implementing, and evaluating a comprehensive cardiac rehabilitation model for home care, with the support of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York and the New York University Langone Medical Center.

Hometown

Short Hills, NJ

School

Nursing

Project Mentor

Terri Lipman

Connect

Contact

Social Media

Blog

Related Projects

Katlyn Grasso (W'15)

Grasso is using the President’s Engagement Prize to further her work with GenHERation, a national female empowerment network for high-school girls. GenHERation works to positively impact girls’ confidence and personal development.

Shadrack Frimpong (C’15)

Frimpong is establishing the Tarkwa Breman Model School for Girls and Community Clinic in his poverty-stricken home village of Tarkwa Breman, Ghana. The school and clinic will also serve citizens in the surrounding seven villages.

Adrian Lievano (EAS’15) and Matthew Lisle (EAS’15)

Lievano and Lisle are developing and implementing Everwaters, a rainwater catchment and purification system and Kimana, Kenya. Once they install the system, Lievano and Lisle will engage the Kimana community through ongoing support and education.